You have the power to make music... evolve

Participate in an online experiment to study cultural evolution in action.

At DarwinTunes.org, bioinformaticist Bob MacCallum and evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi of Imperial College London have devised a way to watch music evolve right before their eyes - and in doing so study the cultural analogue of biological evolution, also known as memetics.

Scientists are not entirely clear on how cultural evolution works, and MacCullum and Leroi are hoping their experiment will shed some light.

"For example, how important is human creative input compared to audience selection? Is progress smooth and continuous or step-like? We set up DarwinTunes as a test-bed for the evolution of music, the oldest and most widespread form of culture; and, thanks to your participation, these questions will soon be answered."

Here's how it works:

MacCullum's computer program creates a randomly generated pair of "Adam and Eve" "songs"--brief loops of sound. They mutate, recombine and reproduce to form a base population of 100 descendants.

Participants act as the force of natural selection by listening to the songs and rating them, from "I love it!" through "It's OK..." to "I can't stand it". For every 20 songs, the 10 worst rated die off, while the 10 best rated go on to reproduce at random, with each "mating" producing two new songs. Each daughter song inherits a mixture of the parents' computer codes, just as a biological organism inherits a mixture of its parents' genetic codes.

"The 'chromosomes' in DarwinTunes are actually tree structures of code," the researchers explain. "There is only one tree structure per song, that is, they are 'haploid'. During recombination a small number of tree nodes are chosen at random in one parent (each node has a 1 in 1000 chance of being chosen). The same number of nodes are then chosen at random in the other parent."

Then random mutation comes into play. Each node of a daughter's code has a one in 1500 chance of mutating. "Eighty per cent of the mutations are 'point mutations' which alter the value of a single atomic piece of information (e.g. note length, note position, wavelength multiple). The remainder are 'macro mutations' which swap, copy, insert, delete or replace part of the tree structure."

When 20 new songs are born, the 10 parents die off, and the process continues in the new generation.

MacCallum and Leroi modelled their experiment on laboratory studies of the evolution of microbes and worms, but they believe the process is similar to how music evolves in real life: "A thousand bands bang away in a thousand garages, mutate the musical idiom of the day, and test the results in the market. Most fail, but a few succeed and popular music continues its relentless evolutionary march."

MacCullum and Leroi are already seeing progress. "The result is more musical than the starting population," MacCullum says. "It was always possible that everyone would pull in different directions and it would go nowhere." The researchers have also been surprised to see how strong the effects of random mutations are on the outcome.

They are hoping to keep the experiment running for at least another week - so now is your chance to be a force of nature, and select.To participate visit http://darwintunes.org/evolve-music

27 Comments

The critical aspect of this is the relationship between the chooser , alternatives generator and the complex and collective outcome of the numerous acts acts of individual choice. In musical contexts, we produce something which probably has a very distant -or at least unknown-relationship with survival than,say,in language .But in humankind's mate choices it gets a lot more serious.Of course in that case,unlike musicians and voting listeners, the population of alternative generators and the population of choosers is one and the same and that population increases by the very act of choice itself! Yet if the variety generation gets stalled ,like in highly inbred races, the race loses its vitality. One eligible bachelor is no more attractive than the next and cupid is seriously underemployed!

The authors of this interesting mimetics experiment perhaps missed a big opportunity to simulate 'sexual choices' and their effects.They could have done it by making 'musicians' out of the same population of 'listeners' arbitrarily (or by a post facto clustering) divided into males and females both of which genders can 'generate' alternatives and choose as well . Out of a polygamous/polyandrous choices made by the choosers, researchers could have done a more interesting experiment.In theory for instance, the experiment could have produced 'musical races' 'musical ethnicities' etc. When you do that long enough with a reasonably large population not only could the experimenters have produced great music but also the great musical traditions- the Indian style music with accent on melody, the western style with accent on harmony and the latin/afro style with accent on rhythms etc etc.They may not be identifiable with these popular labels, but there may have been clusters formed that are clearly distinguishable as styles but styles that are the results of a selection process primarily equivalent to sexual selection.May be song birds do it all the time!

Intuitively, we can see that culture and mankind have co-evolved. Beyond a point in human history the mating choices individuals made have not been 'purely sexual'; mates are chosen for 'being from the same culture' and that basis continues to this day.The colour of the skin or facial and other physical features are genetic but ,to a second order, mimetic(cultural) differentators too ! Mimetics do need a substrate of genetics as much as mind seems to need a substrate of matter!

And one experiment could have taught us so much more,literally the music of the genders.What a Miss....and Mister!

Sam
on December 12, 2009 7:14 AM

I tested this one and found it very interesting and fun idea. Some of the pieces are really nice (if you like electronic music like Chemical Brothers for example). However, the rating requires a bit too much attention, so you can't easily do it between other things, and it's not something I would invest a lot of time to do.

K
on December 16, 2009 11:44 PM

It seems that while this should produce better music over time I am not sure why it would imply that this is how music actually "evolves." in culture.

i would not have figured this had been splendid a few years in the past and yet it's funny just how years varies the manner by which you see many different ideas, thanks with regard to the article it happens to be great to look over anything clever occasionally in lieu of the conventional garbage mascarading as blogs on the web, cheers

I tested this one and found it very interesting and fun idea. Some of the pieces are really nice (if you like electronic music like Chemical Brothers for example). However, the rating requires a bit too much attention, so you can't easily do it between other things, and it's not something I would invest a lot of time to do.

david
on July 12, 2010 12:57 AM

Evenully the adaptation of the sound waves will cease, but before that happens your going to produce frequency modulations that will be horrid thus the order of seletion becomes the lessor of two horrids? so at this point the only hope for the modulated frequencies to servive would take origin of selection to adapt endouring the torture of the horrid sounds, but for how long?,
I guess at this point we would have to reley on our faith in darwin to tranform the horrid clash of sound waves that polverize solids, and implode our entire nerve systems, into a beautiful form?

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